Assuring confident re-use of production drawing information by the NC programming activity

In the heavy/medium manufacturing environment, the generation of NC part programs is a prolific and productive element of CAM. With the increasing use of computer-aided drafting a more effective and automatic method for the generation and transcription of manufacturing instructions and information has become available. The creation and maintenance of a computer graphics database, containing master component definitions, can facilitate the automatic re-use of graphical information by NC part programmers. However, near automatic data re-use can only be accomplished by maintaining the integrity of manufacturing information stored in the database, ensuring the correlation between such data and the associated conventional presentation of manufacturing data as traditional orthographic production drawings.